An implicit goal programming model for the tour scheduling problem considering the employee work preferences

Many organizations face employee scheduling problems under conditions of variable demand for service over the course of an operating day and across a planning horizon. These organizations are concerned with the tour scheduling problem that involves assigning shifts and break times to the work days of employees and allocating days off to individual work schedules. Nowadays, organizations try to adopt various scheduling flexibility alternatives to meet the fluctuating service demand. On the other hand, they have also realized that providing employee productivity and satisfaction is as much important as meeting the service demand. Up to date, tour scheduling solution approaches have neglected considering employee preferences and tried to develop work schedules for employees in a subsequent step. This paper presents a goal programming model that implicitly represents scheduling flexibility and also incorporates information about the preferred working patterns of employees. After solving the proposed model, a work schedule will be generated for each employee without requiring a further step for the assignment of shifts, break times, and work days to employees. The model is capable of handling multiple scheduling objectives, and it can produce optimal solutions in very short computing times.